There was excitement, of course, the kind of excitement over an unexpected happening that only a theatrical company can generate. What was it? Why was it? What had happened? What should be done?
It was Waldo Harris who called for order and explained. When Schnak had not appeared on the podium for the last scene, one of the gofers had gone to see what was amiss, and, not finding her in her dressing-room, had looked in the ladies’ lav. And there she was, very ill and unconscious.
Had she tried to kill herself? Nobody knew, and they must not think like that until there was more news from the hospital. Miss Intrepidi let it be known that if it was an attempt at suicide, she, for one, was not surprised, after the way the poor child had been treated during the rehearsal. An Intrepidi party formed immediately, and murmured against Professor Pfeiffer, who was unaware of it and took no notice. He was anxious to continue with the examination.
“This is unfortunate,” he said, “but not perhaps crucial. We can meet now, and make our decisions. I have a great many questions to ask, particularly about the libretto. Where can we be private?”
“But we can’t have an examination without the candidate,” said Penelope Raven.
“We’ve had an examination till I’m bloody sick of it,” said George Cooper. “Let’s give her the degree and be done with it.”
“Give her the degree when there are still vital questions to be asked?” Professor Pfeiffer was scandalized. “I am far from satisfied.”
“You must admit these are unusual circumstances,” said Dean Wintersen. “It can hardly be said we’ve cut corners. We’ve been at it all day. Surely we can come to an agreement now?”
“Agreed! I move acceptance of the thesis and the obligatory performance as completion of the work for the doctoral degree,” said Francesco Berger.
“Excuse me! As the External Examiner that is my privilege,” said Professor Pfeiffer.
“Well then, for Christ’s sake use your privilege,” said George Cooper. “This is ridiculous! That girl may be dead, or dying.”
“I fully understand the compassionate grounds for a hasty decision,” said Pfeiffer; “but in my experience compassionate grounds are rarely sound grounds, and I should like to feel that this examination has been completed in proper form. Frankly, I should like to defer a decision for a week, during which we should attend at least two more performances.”
“Sorry to sound like a dean,” said Wintersen, “but I really must overrule you, Professor. I shall call for a vote, naming the examiners in alphabetical order. Professor Berger?”
The vote was six for acceptance of the degree, Professor Pfeiffer abstaining, and the Dean forgoing his privilege of casting a vote. The examination was over, and Schnak, dead or alive, was therewith a Doctor of Music.
The Cornishes took over. Darcourt was asked to take the examiners to dinner, as they had been detained so long. Gunilla announced her determination to go to the hospital at once, with Arthur and Maria. Professor Pfeiffer said he didn’t want any dinner, but this deceived no one. The singers were shooed off to their dressing-rooms, big with the drama of the afternoon.
Geraint called Waldo and Gwen to him, and set about a long budget of notes he had taken during what was, to him, a disappointing and tediously delayed rehearsal. He would show proper emotion, he said, when everything was shipshape and Bristol fashion.
6
What would a stranger make of this room, if he should happen in here by mistake, thought Darcourt. A beautiful young mother sits in the dim light of the only lamp, suckling her child; the long dressing-robe she wears might belong to any time during the past two thousand years. There are two very large beds in the room and in one of them, under the heavy coverlet, lie two women; one in early middle age and of distinguished, hawk-like face and the other softly pretty, her dark eyes full of mischief. The older woman’s arm is around the neck of her companion, and caresses it. In the second bed I lie myself, fully dressed except for my shoes, and beside me lies a man of great beauty and palpable energy; his open shirt-collar and longish curly dark hair might belong to any time during the last two hundred and fifty years. We too are partly covered, for the August night is chilly, but there is no affectionate link between us. The only other figure in the room is the man whose back is turned to us; he stands at the dressing-table, which has been turned into a pretty well-stocked bar.
The room itself? It looks as if one of those half-timbered houses, perhaps from Stratford-on-Avon or Gloucestershire, had been turned inside out. Dark beams appear to support a structure of lumpy white plaster. This style of interior finish is intended, undoubtedly, as a compliment to the Shakespeare Festival which is the chief glory of this town.
This is Maria and Arthur’s room in the motel where they have been staying, intermittently, for the past three weeks observing—so far as they have been made welcome to observe—the completion of all the preparations for the presentation of Arthur of Britain, and they are entertaining Gunilla, and Dulcy Ringgold, and Geraint and myself. It is ten o’clock at night. We are gathered to talk about the strange behaviour of Hulda—henceforth and forever Doctor Hulda—Schnakenburg, who was borne from her doctoral examination on a stretcher a few hours earlier.
All things considered, the intruding stranger might think it an odd scene, a mixture of the domestic and the reposeful. Or was it some muddle of group sex, arranged for observers of peculiar tastes?
“She’s going to be all right,” said Arthur, turning to give Gunilla another strong Scotch. “But it’s bound to be a little bit embarrassing when she rejoins us. The hospital people want her for a couple of days at least. Her digestive tract has suffered what they call serious insult. They’ve been swilling her out.”
“Little fool,” said Gunilla. “Nearly a hundred Aspirin and half a bottle of gin. Where would she have got the idea that it would kill her?”
“She didn’t mean to kill herself,” said Arthur. “It was what it is now fashionable to call a gesture of despair.”
“No, no, don’t patronize her,” said Gunilla. “She meant to kill herself, undoubtedly. She was just badly informed, as many suicides are.”
“You must admit she made a very effective scene out of it,” said Dulcy. “I was moved. Blubbed quite a lot, I confess it without shame.”
“She saw herself as Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat,” said Maria. “Dying of love for the faithless Lancelot. Hulda has learned a great deal from this opera, quite apart from the music. She did it to make you feel cheap, Geraint, just as Elaine made Lancelot feel cheap. Now, Davy my pet, time to change sides.” She shifted the feeding child to her other breast.
“Do all babies make that slurping noise when they are feeding?” said Geraint.
“It’s a very nice noise, and no impertinent questions from you, my lad. You’re in the doghouse.”
“I’m damned if I’m in the doghouse,” said Geraint. “You can’t blame me. I won’t put up with it.”
“You’ll have to put up with it,” said Dulcy. “Of course it’s unjust, but who are you to escape all of the world’s injustice? This is one of those cases where the female side in the great struggle undoubtedly wins. You scorned her love, which God knows was obvious enough, and she tried to kill herself. Doghouse for you. Bitter shame upon you, Geraint Powell, you heart-breaker, for not less than two weeks.”
“Bullshit!”
“Coarseness ill becomes a man in your position. You are cast as the haughty, gallant, gay Lothario, and if you have any dramatic sense at all—which is what you’re paid to have—you will play the part to the hilt.”
“Is nobody on my side? Sim bach, say a few eloquent words in my defence. How am I to blame?”
“Well, to be totally fair and even-handed, Geraint, I have seen you, now and then, casting inflammatory smiles in her direction.”
“I smile at everybody, particularly when I don’t mean anything by it. Perhaps I smiled—a meaningless grimace of courtesy—at Schnak now and then when she kept
getting under my feet. I swear upon the soul of my dear mother, now adding a fine mezzo to the heavenly choir, that I meant nothing, nothing whatever, by it. I smile at you Nilla, and at you, Dulcy, and God knows I don’t expect it to get me anywhere, you horrible old dykes.”
“Dykes!” said Gunilla indignantly. “How dare you use such a word to me—to us. You are a boor, Geraint.”
“Isn’t he a boor, Nilla? That’s precisely what he is. A boor.
She loved thee, boor; she loved thee, cruel boor;
Shakespeare, freely adapted for the occasion.” Dulcy was enjoying herself greatly. Indignation and Scotch were working strongly inside her.
“She didn’t love me, even if she thought she did.”
“It comes to the same thing.”
“Yes, I fear it does,” said Darcourt. “Poor old Schnak was in the grip of one of the great errors of the frenzied lover. She thought because she loved, she could provoke love in return. Everybody does it, at some time. I speak as the voice of calm reason.”
“And you ignored her cruelly,” said Arthur. “Doghouse for you, Geraint.”
“I suppose I must make a statement,” said Geraint. “What I am about to say does not spring from vanity, but from bitter experience. Listen to me, all of you. Since I was but a winsome lad, women have insisted on falling for me. It has something to do with chemistry, I suppose. Chemistry and the fact (which I state without any vanity whatever) that I am absurdly good-looking. Result, a lot of trouble for me. But am I to blame? I refuse to accept blame. Are beautiful women to blame because men fall for them? Is Maria to blame because just about everybody who sees her falls in love with her, or at least looks upon her to lust after her? I’ll bet that even Sim bach, bloodless old turnip though he is, loves Maria. Can Maria help it? The idea is too ridiculous for discussion. So why am I to blame because Schnak, who is emotionally warped and retarded, gets silly notions about me? My beauty has been a large part of my success as an actor, and I tell you I’m bloody sick of it. That’s why I want to get out of acting and into directing. I will not be sighed at and lallygagged over by audiences of hungry females. I have too keen an intelligence to value such admiration, which is simply aroused by the Livery of Hell—my physical appearance. I am close to middle age, and my beauty is giving way to a ravaged distinction. I have a gammy leg. So perhaps I can look forward to the remainder of my life in peace.”
“I wouldn’t count on that, Geraint,” said Arthur. “You must bear your cross. Even if your looks are going, the chemistry is bubbling away as merrily as ever. But we’re wandering from the point. The point is Schnak. What are you going to do about Schnak?”
“Why must I do anything about her? I’m not going to encourage her, if that’s what you have in mind. I can’t abide the shrimp. It isn’t just that she’s ugly to look at. Her voice goes through me like a rusty saw, and her impoverished vocabulary grates on me unbearably. Even if I were willing to forgo beauty, I simply must have the luxury of language. It isn’t just that she looks ugly. She sounds ugly, and I want none of her.”
“You make a terrible fuss about voices, Geraint,” said Maria.
“Because they are terribly important, and usually neglected. Listen to you, Maria; music every time you open your lips. But most women don’t even know that’s possible. It is one of the three great marks of beauty. It totally changes the face. If Medusa speaks like a goddess, you can’t tell her from Minerva.”
“Very Welsh, Geraint,” said Dulcy.
“And none the worse for that, I suppose?” said Geraint.
“There, my dumpling, that’s enough,” said Maria, and putting little David over her shoulder she patted his back gently. The child gave a mighty belch, extraordinary for his age.
“That boy is obviously going to grow up to be a sailor,” said Arthur.
“Or a great lord of finance, like his daddy,” said Maria.
“Will you call Nanny, darling?”
When Nanny came she was not the stout, red-faced figure of stereotype, but a girl in her early twenties, smart in a blue uniform; David was her first charge.
“Come on, my lambie,” she said, in a Scottish voice that made Geraint glance at her approvingly. “Time for bed.”
She took the child over her shoulder, and this time David gave a long, reflective fart. “That’s the boy,” said Nanny.
“David has more sense than the lot of you,” said Geraint. “He has summed up this whole argument in a masterly blast. Let’s hear no more of it.”
“Oh, but we must,” said Maria. “You can’t get out of it. Even if you didn’t encourage Schnak, you must comfort her. The logic is clear, but it would take too long to spell it out.”
“I’ll throw up the show, first,” said Geraint, and, dragging himself from under the heavy cover, he stamped out of the room. He avoided the cliché of slamming the door.
The others chewed over the rights and wrongs of the situation for quite a long time, until Darcourt fell asleep. It was midnight when they went to their own quarters. The big motel was full of people associated with Arthur in one way or another, and Albert Greenlaw insisted on calling it Camelot. Was there a lot of gossip at Camelot about Lancelot and Elaine? Malory doesn’t say.
7
Geraint was at the hospital the next day, as soon as rules permitted. Schnak was in a room for two, but by good luck the other bed was empty. She sat up in bed, wan and bedraggled, in a hospital gown that had once been blue and was now a poor grey, eating a bowl of orange Jello, washed down with an eggnog.
“You see how it is, old girl,” said Geraint. “Just one of those unlucky things. Neither of us to blame. The working of Fate.”
“I’ve been a selfish shit and embarrassed everybody,” said Schnak. Tears did nothing to improve her looks.
“No, you haven’t and you aren’t. And I wish you’d take a vow to stop saying ‘shit’ all the time; talk shit and your life will be shit.”
“My life is shit. Everything goes contrary with me.”
“Mrs. Gummidge!”
“Who’s Mrs. Gummidge?”
“If you’re a good girl and get well soon I’ll lend you the book.”
“Oh, somebody in a book! All you people like Nilla and the Cornishes and that man Darcourt seem to live out of books. As if everything was in books!”
“Well, Schnak, just about everything is in books. No, that’s wrong. We recognize in books what we’ve met in life. But if you’d read a few books you wouldn’t have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin. You’d see a few things coming. About love, for instance. You thought you loved me.”
Schnak gave a painful howl.
“All right then, you think you love me now. Come on, Schnak, say it. Say, ‘I love you, Geraint.’ “
Another howl.
“Come on. Out with it! Say it, Schnak.”
“I’d die first.”
“Look, Schnak, that’s what comes of building your vocabulary on words like ‘shit’. Great words choke you. If you can’t say love, you can’t feel love.”
“Yes I can!”
“Then say so!”
“I’m going to be sick.”
“Good. Here’s a basin. I’ll hold your head. Up she comes! Hmm—doesn’t look too bad, for what you’ve been doing to yourself. Almost as good as new. I’ll just put this down the John, then you have a sip of water and we’ll go on.”
“Leave me alone!”
“I will not leave you alone! You’ve got to whoop up more than that eggnog if you’re to be really well. Let me wipe your mouth. Now we’ll try again: say, ‘I love you, Geraint.’ “
The defeated Schnak buried her face in her pillow, but among the sobs she managed to whisper, “I love you.”
“That’s my brave girl! Now look at me, and I’ll sponge your eyes. I’m your friend, you know, but I don’t love you—not the way you think you love me. Oh, my dear old Schnak, don’t think I don’t understand! We’ve
all had these awful hopeless passions, and they hurt like hell. But if we were romantic lovers, the kind you’re thinking of, do you suppose I’d hold your head while you puked, and mop your face, and try to make you see reason? The kind of love you’re dreaming about takes place on mossy banks, amid the scent of flowers and the song of birds. Or else in luxurious chambers, where you loll on a chaise longue, and I take off your clothes very slowly until we melt into a union of intolerable sweetness, and not a giggle or a really kind word spoken the whole time. It’s the giggles and the kind words that you need for the long voyage.”
“I feel like a fool!”
“Then you’re quite wrong. You’re not a fool, and only a fool would think you were. You’re an artist, Schnak. Maybe a very good one. Romantic Art—which is what’s kept you busy since last autumn—is feeling, shaped by technique. You’ve got bags of technique. It’s feeling that kills you.”
“If you grew up like I grew up, you’d hate the word feeling.”
“I grew up in a boiling tank of feeling. All tied up, somehow, with religion. When I said I was going to be an actor my parents raved as if they’d seen me in Hell already. But my dad was a fine actor—a pulpit actor. And my mam was Sarah Bernhardt twenty-four hours a day. They poured it all into the chapel, of course. But I wanted a bigger stage than that, because I had an idea of God, you see, and my God showed himself in art. I couldn’t trap God in the chapel. An artist doesn’t want to trap God; he wants to live and breathe God, and damned hard work it is, stumbling and falling.”
“I hate God.”
“Good for you! You don’t say, ‘There is no God,’ like a fool; you say you hate Him. But Schnak—you won’t like this, but you have to know—God doesn’t hate you. He’s made you special. When Nilla is being confidential she hints that you may be really special. So think of it this way: give God His chance. Of course He’ll take it anyway, but its easier for you if you don’t kick and scream.”
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